My computer is brand-spanking new. I've had it less than a week, and it's already slowing down. I could download programs at around 44.0KB per second, and now it's slowed down to around 5KB per second. I used to be able to load webpages in the blink of an eye, but now my DSL feels like dial-up because it's so slow. I've got 512MB of Memory and the processor is an AMD Athlon XP running at 2.6GHz. If it helps, today I set up a local network with another, older computer in my house that runs at 1.4GHz and only has 256MB of RAM. Could that be a factor?
Watch it, you're on thin ice. ... I was implying that you probably have spyware you need to deal with. It can slow your PC to a crawl.
My computer came with megabytes of anti-spyware software preinstalled. Besides, like I said, all of a sudden my computer's fast again.
Yeah, that's Windows for you. A long time ago I was a helpdesk tech, and that was usually the first thing we had people do. ~90% of the time, it did the trick.